From Aversion to Normalization: Philosemitism in Postwar Europe 1945 to the Present

My project investigates the emergence of “philosemitism” in Western Europe after the Second World War. Despite many ambiguities, expressions of empathy towards Jews and Jewishness have radically challenged the exceptionality of the Jewish condition in European history. Yet while the literature on antisemitism is vast, there is to this day not a single comprehensive study on the positive meanings of Jewishness in post-Holocaust Europe. In this book project, I explore the various stages and multiple functions of philosemitic discourse and sentiment from the defeat of Nazism to the 21th Century. Not merely motivated by “anti-antisemitism” or atonement, philosemitism functioned above all as a language allowing its practitioners to reconstruct European ethics through the prism of Jewishness. This movement did not prevent manifestations of anti-Jewish bias and at times reified antisemitic tropes under the cover of Judeophilia. It nonetheless laid the foundations for an unprecedented moral revolution in contemporary European history.

Philosemitism in Post-Holocaust Europe

Before the Holocaust, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1946, Jews were people “in whose destiny all others thought they could remain uninterested because of the tenet that Jewish history obeys ‘exceptional laws’.” My investigation of “philosemitism” in Western European thought, culture, and politics after 1945 begins where the great German Jewish philosopher left off. Despite many ambiguities, expressions of empathy towards Jewishness after the Second World War have radically challenged the exceptionality of the Jewish condition in European history. To be sure, favorable characterizations of Jews have always formed a quiet counterpoint to the strong anti-Judaic tradition in the West. Recent scholarship, such as the essays recently collected in Philosemitism in History (Cambridge UP, 2011), has unveiled multiple traces of support for Judaism or imputed Jewish virtues, from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment and the modern era. But even when deployed as a countervailing force against Judeophobia, pre-1945 philosemitism carried little weight against marginalization and oppression.

The opening of the post-Holocaust era, however, is generally described as a turning point in the history of Jewish-non-Jewish relations. To erase the taint of wartime collaboration and passivity, prominent European intellectuals, churchmen and political figures harbored sympathy towards Jews. Jean Paul Sartre’s influential Réflexions sur la Question Juive (1946) is the most iconic text in this regard. The same applies to the United States where in reaction to the disappointing rescue efforts by the Roosevelt administration theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr swayed the mainline Protestant public toward pro-Jewish sympathy and Christian Zionism. But while historians have rightly claimed that the Holocaust was pivotal in the evolution of Christian-Jewish relations, the positive image of postwar Jewishness is neither reducible to “anti-antisemitism” nor atonement. As I demonstrate, Western European philosemitism functioned above all as a language and a cultural code allowing its different practitioners to engage with the postwar world.

I delineate this argument through a chronological narrative comprised between the liberation of Europe to the present. I start with the appearance of philosemitic humanitarian sentimentality noticeable in responses to the Jewish refugee crisis in occupied Germany. Here I focus on French, Italian and English writers for whom the image of Jewish statelessness served as a potent human rights trope. Occupied Germany, where the haunting presence of Holocaust survivors stirred up unease and antagonism, did not share in this empathy. But another Jewish refugee figure, that of the intellectual hounded out by Nazism and returning from exile, shaped the philosemitic sensitivities of a new cohort of German thinkers. As Jürgen Habermas recently recalled, his generation learned from Jewish emigrants “how to distinguish the traditions that are worthy of being continued from a corrupt intellectual heritage.”

I then explore the rhetoric of Judeo-Christian “morality”, “tradition” and “civilization” in the writings of Catholic and Protestant clergymen and theologians. The archives of the World Council of Churches (Geneva) offer a unique window into the European singularities of the Judeo-Christian movement. Although advocated as a sacred union against Nazi and Communist “paganism”, Judeo-Christianism was not merely a weapon in the cultural Cold War. It also inaugurated a new partnership between Christians and the people of the Book based on equality and historical complementarity. I further probe the depth and dilemmas of religious philosemitism in a sub-chapter on Christian humanitarianism and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. I describe a permanent struggle between claims of justice and impartial benevolence, universal human rights and Christian Zionism, empathy for Palestinian refugees and identification with Jews as lovable symbols of persecution.

Thinking about Judaism has also taken a positive function in postwar secular thought. Jews occupied indeed a particular place in humanist philosophy, particularly in France in the decade following liberation. The writings of Albert Camus, Jacques Maritain and Jean Paul Sartre are indicative of their paradigmatic place in this moral framework. In several essays, Camus depicts Holocaust survivors as the epitome of powerlessness. Yet the Jewish trope served another purpose in Camus’s reaction to the Algerian war. Longing for a Mediterranean identity at equidistance between French colonialism and Algerian independence, Camus extolled North African Jewishness as a native bridge between European settlers and Arabs. The Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, for his part, sought to restore the original kinship between Christians and Jews by integrating Judaism into his doctrine of “integral humanism” and the dignity of the human person. This radical shift in Christian-Jewish relations, he argued, amounted to no less than a “reorientation of history.” Jean-Paul Sartre used the image of the Jew very differently: as a conduit to anti-colonial resistance, Existentialist Marxism, and the redefinition of the role of the intellectual in the postwar era. As these three cases clearly show, French humanism, like its counterparts in Western Europe, constructed Jewishness as a foil repeatedly referenced.

In a related chapter, I seek to understand how figural Jews wended their ways in European cinema in the two decades following the Holocaust, with particular attention paid to filmmakers Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. Although the visual representation of Jews varied according to context and countries, Jewishness played a vital role in describing the human condition, imagining the other and constructing global ethics. This cultural development did not of course hinder the persistence or antisemitism after 1945. In Western Europe as in the United States, bias and enmity did not magically disappear to make room for unequivocal Judeophilia. But as my research demonstrates, the post-1945 discourse of dignity, human rights, inter-subjectivity and emancipation was heavily infused with Jewish frames of references.

I then turn to the European Left and its relationship with Zionism. The new Israeli Jew exerted a deep fascination on European socialists and left-of-center Christian Democrats. I dedicate one chapter to the impressions recorded by politicians, intellectuals and trade unionists touring Israel from 1948 to the mid-1960s. In their eyes, the Jewish state represented the fulfillment of socialism, self-determination and historical agency. The writings and personal papers of François Mitterand, Willy Brandt, Olof Palme and Harold Wilson, as well as the archives of the Socialist International, similarly reveal the appeal of Israel as an oasis of utopian socialism and an inspiring model for the democratic and welfarist reconstruction of war-torn nations. During the 1950s, Europe’s first social-democratic moment neatly meshed, culturally and politically, with socialist Zionism.

An important juncture in my project is the 1968 student revolts and their approach to the Jewish question. Although Parisian demonstrators defiantly claimed the identity of “German Jews” in support of their arrested leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit and a new Holocaust consciousness challenged prevalent memories of the Second World War, the protest movements in France and Germany marked the end of the foundational period of philosemitism. The humanist identification with Jewishness lost much of its appeal as humanism itself fell in intellectual disrepute. The anti-imperialist New Left, for its part, grew disillusioned with Zionism in the wake of the 1967 June War. Yet the 1968 counter-culture did not bring the clock of European philosemitism back to 1945. In fact, it stimulated new forms of empathy. Thanks to humanitarian activists stemming from the New Left, the Holocaust became in the 1970s the archetypal metanarrative of suffering in the north Atlantic world. The “imaginary Jew”, to quote the critical phrase coined in 1981 by the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, was now a powerful metaphor for trauma. Undeniably, the explosion of human rights and militant humanitarianism in the 1970s coincided with a new brand of “therapeutic” philosemitism informed by Holocaust memory. I use the archives of Amnesty International to document this shift: completely absent in its first decade of existence (1961-1971), references to the Holocaust later abound in Amnesty’s campaigns in favor of prisoners of conscience and victims of torture. Similarly, invocations of the Holocaust were central to the language and ideology embraced by the founding generation of Doctors without Borders.

The impact of the radical sixties on European philosemitism is not however limited to the entanglement of the Holocaust with new perceptions of trauma and victimhood. As several scholars have amply demonstrated, Jewish difference has also been constructed, in the writings Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard or Georgio Agamben, as a trope to signifying the post-modern condition. The final part of my book project follows however a more mainstream route. In a concluding chapter, which will start with a reexamination of Willy Brandt’s symbolic kneeling in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in December 1970, I plan to address the deep entanglements linking Jewishness, the Holocaust and the cosmopolitan identity promoted in the past two decades by the European Union. Alarming acts of antisemitism, often coinciding with the intensification of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, regularly make the headlines of European newspapers. And by a twist of fate, philosemitism is today dubiously appropriated by far-right and populist movements to justify xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Teaching Areas

Modern European History; Modern French History; Displacement and Human Rights

G. Daniel Cohen "“Toward a History of Philosemitic Europe” In EuropeNow Journal, Council of European Studies, November 2017, available at: http://www.europenowjournal.org/2017/11/01/towards-a-history-of-philosemitic-europe-since-1945/."

G. Daniel Cohen and Anna Holian "“Refugee History: State of the Field”. Introduction to special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies, The Refugee in the Postwar World, forthcoming June 2012, under my editorship in collaboration with Dr. Anna Holian, Arizona State University.
." In Press

""Regeneration through Labor: Vocational Training and the Reintegration of Deportes and Refugees, 1945-1950", Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, Volume 32, 2005." Proceedings of the Western Society for French History

Books

Gerard Daniel Cohen "Histories of Human Rights from Abolitionism to the Present." Wiley Blackwell, Under Contract (2016) In Progress

G. Daniel Cohen "“The Holocaust and the Human Rights Revolution of the 1940s: A Reassesment” in Akira Iriye, William Hitchcock and Petra Goedde, The Human Rights Revolution. An International History, Oxford University Press, December 2011.."

G.D Cohen "“The Holocaust and the Human Rights Revolution of the 1940s: A Reassesment” in Akira Iriye, William Hitchcock and Petra Goedde, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century: An International History, Oxford University Press, Scheduled for publication in 2011. Status: in production. ." In Press

G. Daniel Cohen "Dan Stone, The Liberation of The Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath in H-Nationalism, August 2017. Available at: https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/reviews/189849/cohen-stone-liberation-camps-end-holocaust-and-its-aftermath ."

"“Displaced Persons and Global Migration in Post-1945 Europe” , Conference on “Migration, Refugees and Asylum since the Second World War in Global Perspective", Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 14-16 December 2016."

Invited Papers

"“Philosemitic Western Europe? The Jewish Question in the Aftermath of the War 1945-1967”, “Building from the Ashes. Jews in Europe 1945-1950”, Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main, 3-5 December 2017. ."

Between Relief and Politics: Humanitarianism in Occupied Germany, International History Workshop, Temple University (Philadelphia, PA), May 18-19, 2007

"The 'Human Rights Revolution' and Forced Displacement in the 1940s, Human Rights History Workshop, Indiana University, Bloomington, March 8-9, 2006.."

"UNRRA and the IRO: The Emergence of Modern Humanitarianism, 1945-1950., University of London, Birkbeck College, June 19, 2006.."

""Population Management in the Aftermath of World War Two", After Fascism: The Re-Democratization of Western European Societies and Political Culture after 1945, University of Vienna (Austria), May 19-21, 2005.."